Diamonds OTOH have a mass value in excess of $340,000/kg
Diamonds can be manufactured synthetically in a laboratory using little more than carbon and pressure, both of which are easily available without going into space. This of course ignores the fact that diamonds require immense pressure to be created so I'm curious why you think a tiny asteroid in a VACUUM would be a likely place to find diamonds.
If you are the only supplier you can charge w/e the fuck you want.
Not even monopolies can or would do this. A monopoly that is trying to maximize profit actually will charge predictable rates based on consumer demand.
Furthermore, I think you'll be hard pressed to come up with an example of anything we could retrieve from space for which there is not already a market here on Earth. Go ahead and mine copper from space. Better be able to sell it cheaper than the copper mines here on Earth.
Yes, but the worth of the asteroid's metals isn't measured in "future potential price". It's measured in "How valuable is it right now".
Not a finance geek are you? Go read about net present value and try that again. The value of any investment is measured as the (say it with me) the "present value of all FUTURE free cash flows". Welcome to Finance 101.
You forge the gold into a landing module and use a mass-accelerate to bring it back to earth.
Forge the imaginary gold using technology we don't have and somehow accelerate that back to earth without burning it up in the atmosphere or turning it into a bomb in the process. Riiiight...
You leave your mining equipment out there to get more precious materials...
What precious materials? What are we so hard up for that it is cheaper to spend billions to try to retrieve tiny quantities of unknown materials from asteroids of unknown composition millions of kilometers out in space using technology we haven't developed yet? I support space exploration as much as anyone but the idea of an economic return from asteroid mining is absurd to anyone who has ever seen an actual balance sheet.
Ever heard of Self-replicating machines ?
How about magic pixie dust and unicorn farts while you're talking about things that don't exist in the real world.
This type of mission has great potential for positive economic return based on the fact that no effort has to be spent on getting in and out of a distant planet's gravity well.
Someone is forgetting that one has to get in/out of EARTH's gravity well which is the biggest one outside of the gas giants. Then you have to actually mine whatever it is (which we lack the technology to do) in deep space and safely bring it back intact. What are you going to mine in any serious quantity that you can safely return to earth without the item either burning up in the atmosphere or turning the item being returned into a weapon. (Remember that any significant fraction of an asteroid makes a heck of a divot when it hits the earth at high speed.) I can't imaging there are a lot of asteroids composed of precious metals floating around. Maybe there is an asteroid filled with inkjet refills or human blood?
Seriously, even ignoring the technical issues (which are huge) I haven't heard anything relating to mining asteroids that remotely makes economic sense. What could we possibly mine on an asteroid that could be worth the enormous cost of retrieving it from the asteroid belt? We only have a vague idea of what many of these things are composed of and what we do know isn't anything terribly rare here on Earth. The idea of mining asteroids is a romantic and cool idea but we would have to be SERIOUSLY in desperate need of something to make the economics of asteroid mining make any kind of sense.
Scientific research? Hell yeah. Economic return? Not likely in this century.
Trust me, I have implemented just about any security method in a variety of settings (medical, financial,...).
What about military? I've worked in medical, financial, manufacturing and retail too. Military is very different.
The fact remains that people can't be bothered to lock their screens when they step out because it's "too difficult" and "too complicated" let alone click the button to encrypt their e-mail or their USB sticks.
Very true but the difference is that the military can send you to prison for the rest of your life if you get caught being sufficiently lazy/sloppy/incompetent with secure data. The same laws we live by in civilian life don't apply much of the time. The worst a financial firm can do is fire you. I'm not saying that people don't behave exactly as you describe (I'm sure they do) but there are people in the military who actually pay attention to this stuff.
If you're making money you should be paying for the tools you use.
I don't think anyone is seriously debating that. (well, some are but mostly not the people actually making money) But you're missing the important question which is "how much are those tools worth"? I can think of lots of tools where the asking price is more than I'm willing to pay. I can also think of tools where I'd be willing to pay more than is being asked. It is also honest business to negotiate the amount you are willing to pay for a technology. Just because someone asks a price doesn't mean I am being unethical in offering a lower price in return. What you regard as a low price might very well be an absurd price to me. There is no way for you to know how much something is worth to me unless I tell you.
It might be that any price higher than free is higher than people's willingness to pay. We are after all talking about technology (software) which can be replicated for a marginal cost of approximately zero and which is used primarily for entertainment purposes. That doesn't mean the creators aren't entitled to ask for whatever they like but we're all well aware that most costs to them have already been incurred. I think Youtube is nifty and all but would I pay to use the technology? Not for many personal uses I can think of. It's a non-essential technology for me so my willingness to pay any sort of royalties (directly or indirectly) is low to begin with. (I don't subscribe to cable tv for instance because the cost is too high for the amount of utility I get from it) Saying you should pay for tools you use is fine but you HAVE to follow up with how much? If the price is too high you won't be making money anymore.
they could seal the Strait of Hormuz which would majorly fuck up the US's oil supplies
No it wouldn't. It would screw up PRICES but the US actually gets fairly little oil from the middle east. Only Saudi Arabia is in the top 5 exporters of oil to the US and I suspect they might take issue with Iran screwing up the oil market. Furthermore the US has ample military means of responding to such an overt threat. The US doesn't really want to tangle with Iran but Iran REALLY doesn't want to tangle with the US military.
Therefore it is natural for the nation of Iraq to form close ties with Iran.
Except they fought a long a bloody war and hate each other. Otherwise you might have a point.
If there is a more gullible group of people than audiophiles, I haven't met them.
Sure you have in the form of anyone who pays a tithe to their church or worse to a televangelist. At least you can be sure the overpriced audio equipment exists even if it doesn't remotely live up to its inflated claims. George Carlin was right when he said religion is the hands down undisputed champion of BS. I don't know which depresses me more, the invisible guy in the sky story or the fact people (literally) buy into it.
Net neutrality is centralized planning. In this case planning of the internet and trying to make it work better.
Ahh, the presumption that unregulated markets always work things out in the end. Haven't we put this tired argument to rest yet? Yes, too much regulation is bad but that doesn't make no regulation good.
If the US was competitive in the broadband market rather then forced into sponsored monopolies, we would have far more options for providers, better pricing, 100+ Mb lines would be common, and these discussions about lack of available bandwidth would be far less worrisome.
The fault in your logic is in assuming perfect competition is the most economically efficient outcome when in fact the immense capital costs of a telecom network actually tends towards a natural monopoly. There is a reason we rarely have more than one gas/electric/telephone company in a given area and it is almost purely a matter of cost accounting. (disclosure I am an accountant) The costs of building and maintaining such a network are immense and economies of scale matter tremendously. Having enough competitors such that none of them have pricing power can actually makes it MORE expensive to provide telecom service because unless they merge, none of them can achieve minimum efficient scale.
The usual solution is instead to allow a monopoly or oligopoly and to regulate it if the product provided is sufficiently critical (like electricity or telephone service). There is no perfect solution and while competition is a good thing, a competitive marketplace is not always competitive or even desirable in all cases. I agree that ideally more competition would be better but it's not so easy to achieve in a sustainable way in this case. Telecom networks are expensive and redundant networks actually can drive costs (and by extension prices) up.
The works themselves are not property. What is property is the copyright.
A distinction without a difference since you can't have a copyright on a non-existent work. The copyright is what grants ownership of the work. You sell the copyright and you have effectively sold the ownership of the work.
So no, the argument is not whether ideas can be property. Even those who support copyright, if knowledgeable about the Constitution and the law, do not claim that ideas are property.
Ideas certainly can be and are property in a practical sense. If I have an implementation of an idea and you are restricted from copying my implementation of that idea, voila - the idea is de-facto property for at least some circumstances. Same thing with a patent. The Lord of the Rings or Winnie the Pooh are ideas and you'd be hard pressed to convince me that they are not property under our current laws.
Whether that is a good thing or not is a separate issue. While it's admirably idealistic to want to abolish copyright and patents I have yet to see anyone argue against copyright or patents who has a solution for the free rider problem. Solve the free rider problem and we can do away with intellectual property. Plus you can collect your Nobel prize in economics. Until then, copyright and patents are sort of the least worst situation albeit in drastic need of reform.
The OP mentioned "North America". Incredible as it seems, there's this country in North America to the north of the US with 35 million people in it that might want to see this event. Remarkably, this story is relevant for them.
Seeing as how I live in the lower 48 states and am further north than a huge percentage of the Canadian population I have to say you might want to consult a map. Most of the major cities in Canada are barely north of the border. Hell I could be in one of them within 40 minutes if the border crossing wasn't crowded.
Boats are expensive too. Very expensive actually and require a lot of labor to maintain. Not to mention that water and electronics are not comfortable bedfellows. Plus you need an inexpensive source of electricity. Marine diesels are efficient but still quite costly compared to the grid. I can think of good reasons to have a floating data center but reduced costs doesn't strike me as probable.
Well, if the company was making a decent profit, then the investors would get their return in dividends,
A company only should pay a dividend if the company believes the return on investment the company can make is less than the return the shareholders can make on their own with other investments. In other words, paying a dividend is normally an admission that the company is a shitty or slow growing investment. If a pre-IPO company is paying a dividend they are basically saying you can do better with this money than we can by reinvesting it in the company. No less an authority than Warren Buffet frowns on paying dividends and his company (Berkshire Hathaway) does not pay a dividend.
Please note, it's not that dividends are all bad but just that a dividend is often not the best use of capital. If a company can't make better use of capital than its shareholders, why be in business?
which would also make the company easier to sell whole to other investors.
Potential purchasers would want the cash (at a discount preferably) rather than having it paid out to investors. Paying out a dividend makes a company LESS attractive to investors because the company is disposing of assets (cash) that could be put to use.
But for companies that size (multi-billion) it isn't that easy to find buyers, granted.
Skype isn't actually that big a company. Not tiny but one of the big telecoms or a tech company like Apple could buy them easily - not that they should. Skype's valuation is (or rather was) bloated way beyond reasonable and eBay HUGELY overpaid for Skype. The proof is that eBay eventually wrote off much of the investment as unrecoverable.
Businesses don't pay sales tax twice. They also don't pay income tax twice.
With a subchapter C corporation a the owners of a business are taxed on the same income twice. Once at the corporate level and then again at the personal level. It's one of the ongoing arguments in favor of reducing corporate taxation.
You do realize that corporations just pass their taxes along to their consumers as a cost of doing business, right?
The proper term for that is Incidence of Taxation. That's why taxing an oil company ultimately is a tax on those who buy the oil company's products. The oil company isn't going to eat the cost of a tax increase unless some competitive pressure or regulation prevents them from passing the cost on. Doesn't mean it isn't worth doing but it's important to know who ultimately will pay the cost of any taxation.
As I understand it, these sales tax exemptions correspond roughly to the deduction of business expenses from taxable income.
You understand wrong. Let's say ManufacturerCo sells a bolt to ExampleCo who then uses the bolt in an assembly which they sell to CustomerCo. If the government taxed ManufacturerCo on the sale of the bolt, they would ALSO be able to tax ExampleCo on the same bolt. CustomerCo would have to pay sales tax TWICE on the same part. Sales tax exemptions ensure that the government only gets to tax the sale of a product once. They actually are an extremely logical piece of the tax system. Would you prefer to pay sales tax multiple times on the same stuff?
Our whole legal system is built that way... you need a 3rd party expert in order to actually utilize the system.... sometimes you are not even allowed to access it yourself.
Our whole computer system is built that way... you need a 3rd party expert in order to actually utilize the system.... sometimes you are not even allowed to access it yourself.
Funny how someone else's job is always easier. After all, it's easy to critique what we don't understand.
Look, you don't want a simple legal system. You don't want a simple accounting system. Really. I'm dead serious. A system that is easy enough for everyone to understand is not going to work very well. Life is to complicated for that. We have division of labor because it allows things that are not possible without it. Do you REALLY want to be an expert on the finer points of international fishing regulations? Do you REALLY want to understand all the details of Sarbanes-Oxley? When was the last time you replaced a piston ring in your car? Maybe you have done one of these things but I'm pretty confident you haven't done all of them. The real world is a complicated place and relying on people who've developed an expertise is not a bad thing so long as you guard against potential abuses.
Our government is the only organization I have ever heard of that refuses to tell you how much you owe!
Nonsense. The government tells you exactly how much you might owe ahead of time. What they can't tell you ahead of time is how much you made. They provide (and enforce) the rules for calculating your income. You can do the calculations yourself or you can hire someone else to do it for you.
Could you imagine if you went to buy a car, and the ford dealership gave you the keys, then told you to submit payment, but never told you the price of the car?
Ahh, slashdot. Home of the useless and ill informed car analogies. Could you come up with a worse one? I'm not sure it's possible since this one seems to have set a new bar for absurdity.
I find it silly that we have to hire people to tell us how much we owe....
You don't hire a CPA to tell you what you owe. You hire a CPA to figure out how much you made. Accountants (myself included) get paid because calculating income (and profit) is actually a complicated endeavor. Calculating taxes once you know the amount of income is easy. Any fool can do it and the calculations for any given level of income are known to everyone. Calculating income is actually the difficult question here and if you don't think defining and calculating income is hard, you don't understand the problem sufficiently.
While it makes for good political rants, the reason our tax code is complicated is primarily because income comes in many many forms and defining what is and is not income is a really complicated problem. All the special interest stuff adds a bit to the mess but even without it it would still be a mess. We can simplify it but no matter what tax scheme you come up with you still need to define income in a way that doesn't allow for loopholes. There is no way I'm aware of to do that without a fairly voluminous set of rules governing what constitutes income.
Not everyone receives a W-2. Also, there's income from other sources, interest, stocks, dividends, tips, etc. But I do agree it could be a lot simpler.
Not as much as most people presume. The reason the tax code is complicated is because income comes in a lot of forms (as you noted) and the difficulty is in defining what income is and what it is not. Our tax code has evolved over time to eliminate loopholes and this is what constitutes much of the complication. Yes there is some unnecessary social engineering going on but speaking as a certified accountant (yes I am one), that's unquestionably NOT what makes doing your taxes such a headache. Defining income without any loopholes in the definition is an inherently complicated task. Far harder than most people will ever realize. As a result we have a pretty complicated tax code. It could be simpler but not as much as you probably would like.
To make an imperfect computer analogy, getting the core code for a complicated problem might be fairly simple but working out all the corner cases and weird exceptions can add tremendously to the volume of code. Same thing with our tax code. At its core you basically pay X% based on Y income. Not hard. But defining what income is turns out to be a very complicated problem indeed.
It occurs to me that a simple percentage based income tax would not require anything more complicated than your W-2 form and a calculator to figure out.
The reason you are wrong is because you first have to define "income" and doing that is actually quite complicated. Seriously - it's not easy. Especially if you don't want any loopholes. Just define income as W2 earnings and every taxpayer will magically make no money on their W2's the following year and all of them will be compensated some other way that isn't taxable. I'd be perfectly happy to be compensated in stock grants or in bullion instead of fiat currency if my compensation wasn't taxable. If a loophole is available people will take advantage of it and while we dislike taxes, they are actually necessary for the efficient functioning of society.
It is true that some of the social engineering has made our tax code more complicated, but MOST of the complication is simply due to the difficulty of defining what income is (and what it is not). The social engineering bits add a little to the complication but they aren't what keeps your friendly neighborhood CPA employed. The actual payment calculations are pretty simple even now. For what it is worth, if your financial picture is very simple you probably actually can do your taxes with just a 1040, a W2 and your calculator. This describes more people than you might think.
A reed switch with a flip-flop style latch would be totally invisible from outside of the calculator. Just carry a small magnet and hover it over the magic spot on your calc to switch memory banks.
If you are smart enough to do this you probably are smart enough to just go ahead and do well on the test without cheating.
In all fairness, most football programs MAKE money for the University.
Actually MOST college athletic programs do not make a penny. That particular fact is not exactly a secret. About 50 of the biggest athletic programs make a profit and a handsome one at that. The rest require funding. A successful athletic program does have a HUGE impact on alumni donations though which is where the justification for them sometimes comes. Seriously. It's astonishing to see the difference a good year or two on the playing field will have.
Disclosure - I was a division 1 college athlete in a non-revenue sport. (yes we exist on slashdot) I also have almost zero respect for the NCAA. Bunch of hypocrites they are...
If the light is red and you drive past it, how can you in any way claim to be innocent?
The answer to your question is that your accusers have to prove you were guilty. This is derived primarily from the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution. You are presumed innocent until convicted in a court of competent jurisdiction. You might have committed the infraction but you aren't supposed to be guilty of anything without due process.
Furthermore there could easily be extenuating circumstances which a camera has no possibility of evaluating. We put a lot of limitations on our police for a good reason. Without those limitations police will inevitably abuse their authority. Granting no presumption of innocence when a machine is involved in observing an infraction is in some ways an abuse of power of the worst kind.
Slashdot Mirror
Diamonds OTOH have a mass value in excess of $340,000/kg
Diamonds can be manufactured synthetically in a laboratory using little more than carbon and pressure, both of which are easily available without going into space. This of course ignores the fact that diamonds require immense pressure to be created so I'm curious why you think a tiny asteroid in a VACUUM would be a likely place to find diamonds.
If you are the only supplier you can charge w/e the fuck you want.
Not even monopolies can or would do this. A monopoly that is trying to maximize profit actually will charge predictable rates based on consumer demand.
Furthermore, I think you'll be hard pressed to come up with an example of anything we could retrieve from space for which there is not already a market here on Earth. Go ahead and mine copper from space. Better be able to sell it cheaper than the copper mines here on Earth.
Yes, but the worth of the asteroid's metals isn't measured in "future potential price". It's measured in "How valuable is it right now".
Not a finance geek are you? Go read about net present value and try that again. The value of any investment is measured as the (say it with me) the "present value of all FUTURE free cash flows". Welcome to Finance 101.
You forge the gold into a landing module and use a mass-accelerate to bring it back to earth.
Forge the imaginary gold using technology we don't have and somehow accelerate that back to earth without burning it up in the atmosphere or turning it into a bomb in the process. Riiiight...
You leave your mining equipment out there to get more precious materials...
What precious materials? What are we so hard up for that it is cheaper to spend billions to try to retrieve tiny quantities of unknown materials from asteroids of unknown composition millions of kilometers out in space using technology we haven't developed yet? I support space exploration as much as anyone but the idea of an economic return from asteroid mining is absurd to anyone who has ever seen an actual balance sheet.
Ever heard of Self-replicating machines ?
How about magic pixie dust and unicorn farts while you're talking about things that don't exist in the real world.
This type of mission has great potential for positive economic return based on the fact that no effort has to be spent on getting in and out of a distant planet's gravity well.
Someone is forgetting that one has to get in/out of EARTH's gravity well which is the biggest one outside of the gas giants. Then you have to actually mine whatever it is (which we lack the technology to do) in deep space and safely bring it back intact. What are you going to mine in any serious quantity that you can safely return to earth without the item either burning up in the atmosphere or turning the item being returned into a weapon. (Remember that any significant fraction of an asteroid makes a heck of a divot when it hits the earth at high speed.) I can't imaging there are a lot of asteroids composed of precious metals floating around. Maybe there is an asteroid filled with inkjet refills or human blood?
Seriously, even ignoring the technical issues (which are huge) I haven't heard anything relating to mining asteroids that remotely makes economic sense. What could we possibly mine on an asteroid that could be worth the enormous cost of retrieving it from the asteroid belt? We only have a vague idea of what many of these things are composed of and what we do know isn't anything terribly rare here on Earth. The idea of mining asteroids is a romantic and cool idea but we would have to be SERIOUSLY in desperate need of something to make the economics of asteroid mining make any kind of sense.
Scientific research? Hell yeah. Economic return? Not likely in this century.
Trust me, I have implemented just about any security method in a variety of settings (medical, financial, ...).
What about military? I've worked in medical, financial, manufacturing and retail too. Military is very different.
The fact remains that people can't be bothered to lock their screens when they step out because it's "too difficult" and "too complicated" let alone click the button to encrypt their e-mail or their USB sticks.
Very true but the difference is that the military can send you to prison for the rest of your life if you get caught being sufficiently lazy/sloppy/incompetent with secure data. The same laws we live by in civilian life don't apply much of the time. The worst a financial firm can do is fire you. I'm not saying that people don't behave exactly as you describe (I'm sure they do) but there are people in the military who actually pay attention to this stuff.
If you're making money you should be paying for the tools you use.
I don't think anyone is seriously debating that. (well, some are but mostly not the people actually making money) But you're missing the important question which is "how much are those tools worth"? I can think of lots of tools where the asking price is more than I'm willing to pay. I can also think of tools where I'd be willing to pay more than is being asked. It is also honest business to negotiate the amount you are willing to pay for a technology. Just because someone asks a price doesn't mean I am being unethical in offering a lower price in return. What you regard as a low price might very well be an absurd price to me. There is no way for you to know how much something is worth to me unless I tell you.
It might be that any price higher than free is higher than people's willingness to pay. We are after all talking about technology (software) which can be replicated for a marginal cost of approximately zero and which is used primarily for entertainment purposes. That doesn't mean the creators aren't entitled to ask for whatever they like but we're all well aware that most costs to them have already been incurred. I think Youtube is nifty and all but would I pay to use the technology? Not for many personal uses I can think of. It's a non-essential technology for me so my willingness to pay any sort of royalties (directly or indirectly) is low to begin with. (I don't subscribe to cable tv for instance because the cost is too high for the amount of utility I get from it) Saying you should pay for tools you use is fine but you HAVE to follow up with how much? If the price is too high you won't be making money anymore.
they could seal the Strait of Hormuz which would majorly fuck up the US's oil supplies
No it wouldn't. It would screw up PRICES but the US actually gets fairly little oil from the middle east. Only Saudi Arabia is in the top 5 exporters of oil to the US and I suspect they might take issue with Iran screwing up the oil market. Furthermore the US has ample military means of responding to such an overt threat. The US doesn't really want to tangle with Iran but Iran REALLY doesn't want to tangle with the US military.
Therefore it is natural for the nation of Iraq to form close ties with Iran.
Except they fought a long a bloody war and hate each other. Otherwise you might have a point.
If there is a more gullible group of people than audiophiles, I haven't met them.
Sure you have in the form of anyone who pays a tithe to their church or worse to a televangelist. At least you can be sure the overpriced audio equipment exists even if it doesn't remotely live up to its inflated claims. George Carlin was right when he said religion is the hands down undisputed champion of BS. I don't know which depresses me more, the invisible guy in the sky story or the fact people (literally) buy into it.
Net neutrality is centralized planning. In this case planning of the internet and trying to make it work better.
Ahh, the presumption that unregulated markets always work things out in the end. Haven't we put this tired argument to rest yet? Yes, too much regulation is bad but that doesn't make no regulation good.
If the US was competitive in the broadband market rather then forced into sponsored monopolies, we would have far more options for providers, better pricing, 100+ Mb lines would be common, and these discussions about lack of available bandwidth would be far less worrisome.
The fault in your logic is in assuming perfect competition is the most economically efficient outcome when in fact the immense capital costs of a telecom network actually tends towards a natural monopoly. There is a reason we rarely have more than one gas/electric/telephone company in a given area and it is almost purely a matter of cost accounting. (disclosure I am an accountant) The costs of building and maintaining such a network are immense and economies of scale matter tremendously. Having enough competitors such that none of them have pricing power can actually makes it MORE expensive to provide telecom service because unless they merge, none of them can achieve minimum efficient scale.
The usual solution is instead to allow a monopoly or oligopoly and to regulate it if the product provided is sufficiently critical (like electricity or telephone service). There is no perfect solution and while competition is a good thing, a competitive marketplace is not always competitive or even desirable in all cases. I agree that ideally more competition would be better but it's not so easy to achieve in a sustainable way in this case. Telecom networks are expensive and redundant networks actually can drive costs (and by extension prices) up.
The works themselves are not property. What is property is the copyright.
A distinction without a difference since you can't have a copyright on a non-existent work. The copyright is what grants ownership of the work. You sell the copyright and you have effectively sold the ownership of the work.
So no, the argument is not whether ideas can be property. Even those who support copyright, if knowledgeable about the Constitution and the law, do not claim that ideas are property.
Ideas certainly can be and are property in a practical sense. If I have an implementation of an idea and you are restricted from copying my implementation of that idea, voila - the idea is de-facto property for at least some circumstances. Same thing with a patent. The Lord of the Rings or Winnie the Pooh are ideas and you'd be hard pressed to convince me that they are not property under our current laws.
Whether that is a good thing or not is a separate issue. While it's admirably idealistic to want to abolish copyright and patents I have yet to see anyone argue against copyright or patents who has a solution for the free rider problem. Solve the free rider problem and we can do away with intellectual property. Plus you can collect your Nobel prize in economics. Until then, copyright and patents are sort of the least worst situation albeit in drastic need of reform.
The OP mentioned "North America". Incredible as it seems, there's this country in North America to the north of the US with 35 million people in it that might want to see this event. Remarkably, this story is relevant for them.
Seeing as how I live in the lower 48 states and am further north than a huge percentage of the Canadian population I have to say you might want to consult a map. Most of the major cities in Canada are barely north of the border. Hell I could be in one of them within 40 minutes if the border crossing wasn't crowded.
Other than 'land is expensive'
Boats are expensive too. Very expensive actually and require a lot of labor to maintain. Not to mention that water and electronics are not comfortable bedfellows. Plus you need an inexpensive source of electricity. Marine diesels are efficient but still quite costly compared to the grid. I can think of good reasons to have a floating data center but reduced costs doesn't strike me as probable.
Well, if the company was making a decent profit, then the investors would get their return in dividends,
A company only should pay a dividend if the company believes the return on investment the company can make is less than the return the shareholders can make on their own with other investments. In other words, paying a dividend is normally an admission that the company is a shitty or slow growing investment. If a pre-IPO company is paying a dividend they are basically saying you can do better with this money than we can by reinvesting it in the company. No less an authority than Warren Buffet frowns on paying dividends and his company (Berkshire Hathaway) does not pay a dividend.
Please note, it's not that dividends are all bad but just that a dividend is often not the best use of capital. If a company can't make better use of capital than its shareholders, why be in business?
which would also make the company easier to sell whole to other investors.
Potential purchasers would want the cash (at a discount preferably) rather than having it paid out to investors. Paying out a dividend makes a company LESS attractive to investors because the company is disposing of assets (cash) that could be put to use.
But for companies that size (multi-billion) it isn't that easy to find buyers, granted.
Skype isn't actually that big a company. Not tiny but one of the big telecoms or a tech company like Apple could buy them easily - not that they should. Skype's valuation is (or rather was) bloated way beyond reasonable and eBay HUGELY overpaid for Skype. The proof is that eBay eventually wrote off much of the investment as unrecoverable.
Businesses don't pay sales tax twice. They also don't pay income tax twice.
With a subchapter C corporation a the owners of a business are taxed on the same income twice. Once at the corporate level and then again at the personal level. It's one of the ongoing arguments in favor of reducing corporate taxation.
You do realize that corporations just pass their taxes along to their consumers as a cost of doing business, right?
The proper term for that is Incidence of Taxation. That's why taxing an oil company ultimately is a tax on those who buy the oil company's products. The oil company isn't going to eat the cost of a tax increase unless some competitive pressure or regulation prevents them from passing the cost on. Doesn't mean it isn't worth doing but it's important to know who ultimately will pay the cost of any taxation.
As I understand it, these sales tax exemptions correspond roughly to the deduction of business expenses from taxable income.
You understand wrong. Let's say ManufacturerCo sells a bolt to ExampleCo who then uses the bolt in an assembly which they sell to CustomerCo. If the government taxed ManufacturerCo on the sale of the bolt, they would ALSO be able to tax ExampleCo on the same bolt. CustomerCo would have to pay sales tax TWICE on the same part. Sales tax exemptions ensure that the government only gets to tax the sale of a product once. They actually are an extremely logical piece of the tax system. Would you prefer to pay sales tax multiple times on the same stuff?
Sales tax exemption forms are a Good Thing (TM)
Our whole legal system is built that way... you need a 3rd party expert in order to actually utilize the system.... sometimes you are not even allowed to access it yourself.
Our whole computer system is built that way... you need a 3rd party expert in order to actually utilize the system.... sometimes you are not even allowed to access it yourself.
Funny how someone else's job is always easier. After all, it's easy to critique what we don't understand.
Look, you don't want a simple legal system. You don't want a simple accounting system. Really. I'm dead serious. A system that is easy enough for everyone to understand is not going to work very well. Life is to complicated for that. We have division of labor because it allows things that are not possible without it. Do you REALLY want to be an expert on the finer points of international fishing regulations? Do you REALLY want to understand all the details of Sarbanes-Oxley? When was the last time you replaced a piston ring in your car? Maybe you have done one of these things but I'm pretty confident you haven't done all of them. The real world is a complicated place and relying on people who've developed an expertise is not a bad thing so long as you guard against potential abuses.
Our government is the only organization I have ever heard of that refuses to tell you how much you owe!
Nonsense. The government tells you exactly how much you might owe ahead of time. What they can't tell you ahead of time is how much you made. They provide (and enforce) the rules for calculating your income. You can do the calculations yourself or you can hire someone else to do it for you.
Could you imagine if you went to buy a car, and the ford dealership gave you the keys, then told you to submit payment, but never told you the price of the car?
Ahh, slashdot. Home of the useless and ill informed car analogies. Could you come up with a worse one? I'm not sure it's possible since this one seems to have set a new bar for absurdity.
I find it silly that we have to hire people to tell us how much we owe....
You don't hire a CPA to tell you what you owe. You hire a CPA to figure out how much you made. Accountants (myself included) get paid because calculating income (and profit) is actually a complicated endeavor. Calculating taxes once you know the amount of income is easy. Any fool can do it and the calculations for any given level of income are known to everyone. Calculating income is actually the difficult question here and if you don't think defining and calculating income is hard, you don't understand the problem sufficiently.
While it makes for good political rants, the reason our tax code is complicated is primarily because income comes in many many forms and defining what is and is not income is a really complicated problem. All the special interest stuff adds a bit to the mess but even without it it would still be a mess. We can simplify it but no matter what tax scheme you come up with you still need to define income in a way that doesn't allow for loopholes. There is no way I'm aware of to do that without a fairly voluminous set of rules governing what constitutes income.
Disclosure: I'm a certified accountant
Not everyone receives a W-2. Also, there's income from other sources, interest, stocks, dividends, tips, etc. But I do agree it could be a lot simpler.
Not as much as most people presume. The reason the tax code is complicated is because income comes in a lot of forms (as you noted) and the difficulty is in defining what income is and what it is not. Our tax code has evolved over time to eliminate loopholes and this is what constitutes much of the complication. Yes there is some unnecessary social engineering going on but speaking as a certified accountant (yes I am one), that's unquestionably NOT what makes doing your taxes such a headache. Defining income without any loopholes in the definition is an inherently complicated task. Far harder than most people will ever realize. As a result we have a pretty complicated tax code. It could be simpler but not as much as you probably would like.
To make an imperfect computer analogy, getting the core code for a complicated problem might be fairly simple but working out all the corner cases and weird exceptions can add tremendously to the volume of code. Same thing with our tax code. At its core you basically pay X% based on Y income. Not hard. But defining what income is turns out to be a very complicated problem indeed.
It occurs to me that a simple percentage based income tax would not require anything more complicated than your W-2 form and a calculator to figure out.
The reason you are wrong is because you first have to define "income" and doing that is actually quite complicated. Seriously - it's not easy. Especially if you don't want any loopholes. Just define income as W2 earnings and every taxpayer will magically make no money on their W2's the following year and all of them will be compensated some other way that isn't taxable. I'd be perfectly happy to be compensated in stock grants or in bullion instead of fiat currency if my compensation wasn't taxable. If a loophole is available people will take advantage of it and while we dislike taxes, they are actually necessary for the efficient functioning of society.
It is true that some of the social engineering has made our tax code more complicated, but MOST of the complication is simply due to the difficulty of defining what income is (and what it is not). The social engineering bits add a little to the complication but they aren't what keeps your friendly neighborhood CPA employed. The actual payment calculations are pretty simple even now. For what it is worth, if your financial picture is very simple you probably actually can do your taxes with just a 1040, a W2 and your calculator. This describes more people than you might think.
Disclosure: I'm a certified accountant.
A reed switch with a flip-flop style latch would be totally invisible from outside of the calculator. Just carry a small magnet and hover it over the magic spot on your calc to switch memory banks.
If you are smart enough to do this you probably are smart enough to just go ahead and do well on the test without cheating.
In all fairness, most football programs MAKE money for the University.
Actually MOST college athletic programs do not make a penny. That particular fact is not exactly a secret. About 50 of the biggest athletic programs make a profit and a handsome one at that. The rest require funding. A successful athletic program does have a HUGE impact on alumni donations though which is where the justification for them sometimes comes. Seriously. It's astonishing to see the difference a good year or two on the playing field will have.
Disclosure - I was a division 1 college athlete in a non-revenue sport. (yes we exist on slashdot) I also have almost zero respect for the NCAA. Bunch of hypocrites they are...
If the light is red and you drive past it, how can you in any way claim to be innocent?
The answer to your question is that your accusers have to prove you were guilty. This is derived primarily from the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution. You are presumed innocent until convicted in a court of competent jurisdiction. You might have committed the infraction but you aren't supposed to be guilty of anything without due process.
Furthermore there could easily be extenuating circumstances which a camera has no possibility of evaluating. We put a lot of limitations on our police for a good reason. Without those limitations police will inevitably abuse their authority. Granting no presumption of innocence when a machine is involved in observing an infraction is in some ways an abuse of power of the worst kind.